Adrianne Geffel

by David Hajdu

  In my head, I had calculated that the milling around part of the Jam was probably over by now, so Adry wouldn’t have to deal with trying to carry on conversations with people while music was playing in the background. Her head would have exploded. We got to the school around the time the dancing started. I ceremoniously removed the earplugs from their plastic case and wriggled them into Adry’s ears. We got to the door to the gym, and she stopped and said, “I can still hear a little of the music through these earplugs.” I said, “Fear not—I have further provisions.” I patted her hair down over her ears, then took a long scarf out of my purse that I had liberated from my mother’s wardrobe for the night. I wrapped it around her head, covering her ears—three full times—as stylishly as I could. I clapped my hands a couple of times next to her right ear. Adry shook her head as if to say, “No—nothing,” and we walked in the gym, arm in arm.

  The beat of the music throbbed through the room so physically that nobody really needed to hear the music to dance. Adry and I just followed the people around us, and we danced, and we danced, and we danced. We grooved along to whatever they were playing—Earth, Wind and Fire and Elton John—“Shining Star,” “Philadelphia Freedom”—David Bowie, “Fame,” “Kung Fu Fighting” by whoever that was by. Super-fucking great fucking music! We never got off the dance floor. People danced around us, and lots of people waved or yelled out greetings to us, which nobody could hear over the music, so nobody realized Adry couldn’t hear a thing.

  The night wound down—slow dance time—and they put on Frankie Valli, “My Eyes Adored You.” And Janis Ian, “At Seventeen”—a seriously odd song to play there, but it was a big hit, and the vibe and the tempo were perfect for slow dancing. We stayed on the floor and kept dancing, holding each other close. Adry’s head was nestled close to mine. My mouth was just an inch from the scarf wrapped around her ears. I was sure she couldn’t hear me, and I whispered, “I love you, Adry Geffel.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Models and Muggers

  (1977–1978)

  Ruth Sirotta LeMat (violist, music educator, and widow of Pierson LeMat, Juilliard instructor):

  I met my late husband Pierson in the summer of 1965. We were students. I was attending the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. I was a viola student and was graduated two years later, in 1967, with a BM—a bachelor of music degree, not the potty term. My late husband was about to enter his final year of study at the Cleveland Institute of Music in Cleveland, Ohio, as a student of piano pedagogy and performance. We met at Tanglewood. Both our schools had organized trips there, as many conservatories do, and, consequently, that’s where we met. I wrote a poem about this, which I read at Pierson’s memorial concert at the Juilliard Theater on the evening of November 14, 2007. I’ve always wondered if Adrianne Geffel might have been there that night, in disguise.

  Pierson was a member of the piano faculty at Juilliard when Adrianne applied for admission to the school. He was decidedly instrumental in her being admitted, if you’ll forgive the pun. I had more than a little to do with that. I was teaching theory and composition at the School of the Arts at New York University, where I would teach until my retirement four years ago. As two musicians and music educators, Pierson and I talked often of our trials and tribulations—and our triumphs. I would most certainly consider Adrianne Geffel to qualify in every category.

  In that period, the faculty at Juilliard had the primary responsibility for student admissions. There were demonstrable benefits to this system. For instance, a faculty member who had been teaching a pupil in private lessons could more or less have that person admitted without panicking over it. I could pass along a student of mine to Pierson or recommend the child of a friend, and the student would be accepted without going through all kinds of ghastly red tape. It was so much more convivial than it became after the legal people got involved.

  One night, Pierson came home and told me he had received an application from a very interesting girl in Pennsylvania. Since I had attended conservatory in Philadelphia, Pierson was curious to know if I had ever heard of the young lady’s piano teacher, whose name I don’t recall anymore—I’m sorry. I had never heard of this instructor, and I’ve had no reason to retain her name. Customarily, if someone on the Juilliard faculty was friendly with the applicant’s private teacher, the applicant was a shoo-in.

  Adrianne had submitted a tape recording with the application. She made a cassette tape. This was fairly novel at the time. It subsequently became standard practice in the screening processes for all the conservatories I know, and eventually, students would start sending videos. In those days, the fact that Adrianne had recorded a cassette made her stand out, as did the fact that she had sent in the application fee in cash bills. Pierson brought the tape home, but, to his credit, did not keep the cash for himself. He played the tape on the cassette machine we had for recording lessons in the house. At one point, he called me into the room and replayed a part of it for me to hear. Adrianne had recorded three pieces: a Bach fugue, a Chopin étude, and a third piece neither Pierson nor I could identify. It was decidedly modern, unorthodox but compelling, and Adrianne’s performance of the work had great feeling and also displayed excellent technique. Pierson said something on the order of “Sounds like she can play.”

  I told him, “I’d be curious to know who composed that last piece.”

  Pierson said, “Is it possible this girl wrote it herself?”

  I said, “If she’s a composer on that level, you should bring her in—or I will.”

  Pierson said, “She didn’t apply to NYU. You can’t have her.”

  We read the label on the cassette and found the names of the three composers—Bach, Chopin, and Geffel. The third one of them was approved to audition before the Juilliard faculty.

  Carolyn Geffel:

  I was determined that my daughter Adry would go to college, and not just because I never got to go myself. I’ve done just fine without a college degree, since we own our own business and I haven’t had to fill out a million job applications and check “none” on the line about college and end up missing out on the opportunities I could have had if only I were a college graduate. I dreamed of my daughter fulfilling my dream, if it’s okay to dream about a dream, and see her march onto the campus of Cedar Crest College. I helped her fill out her application for CCC and happily wrote out the twenty-five-dollar check for the fee. To be thorough, we picked a safety school, too—Venango County Community College, VCCC. It was Adry’s own idea—Adry and her friend Barb Lucher, it was their idea—to apply to Juilliard, though I had nothing against that. She paid the application fee herself, out of money she had saved up from babysitting.

  Nina Oberheimer:

  I believed that Adrianne had the talent to follow in my footsteps and study music at Clarion State Teacher’s College. I could practically hear that Clarion call ringing for Adrianne as it had rung for me. I let Adrianne know all about Clarion and what makes it the special place it is—the peaceful setting off to the side of Route 9, the full half-floor of classrooms for music, art, and drama right below the ground floor of the Humanities and Sciences Building, the lively cafeteria life, and the fine instructors, many of whom had advanced degrees in the subjects they were teaching. I said, “Don’t take my word for it, Adrianne—the proof is standing right in front of you. Clarion may not be Juilliard, but . . .”

  Adrianne said, “What’s Juilliard? If Clarion isn’t Juilliard, what is Juilliard?”

  I told her, “Well, you can look it up in the encyclopedia.” And so she did. The next time I saw Adrianne, all she wanted to talk about was Juilliard—Juilliard-this and Juilliard-that. She told me she had decided to apply—she had made up her mind, and would I be so kind as to write her a letter of recommendation? I thought, Well, I don’t want to be the one to burst the girl’s balloon. That’s the Admissions Department’s job. I wrote a glowing letter for her, of course—I thought, if she wants so badly to go to Juilliard, I should help h
er however I can, and it could make all the difference to have a letter of recommendation in my name, with my credentials on it.

  Barbara Lucher:

  So Adry comes over to my house. She says, “I want to go to Juilliard.”

  I say, “Alrighty then—let’s go to Juilliard!”

  She says, “I have to apply first. It’s a music school.”

  So we got crackin’. She’d sent away to the school for information, and brought over this pile of pamphlets and forms to fill out. You were supposed to list all the awards you got and concerts you gave at Carnegie Hall or whatever-the-fuck. Okay—right. Adry’d been playing piano in her bedroom for her teacher and me. She’d performed for precisely two people in her life—three if you count her mother, three and a half if you count her fuck-shit brother Donny. Her father didn’t count. For anything. So we got the idea to tape her with the cassette recorder I got for Christmas from Radio Shack and send the cassette in to show the pointy-heads at Juilliard what the girl could do.

  The paperwork she got listed some music you were expected to be able to play, so Adry practiced up, and I recorded her. We taped two things—classical stuff, unbelievably impressive. She finished, I pushed the off button, and I just looked at her. I said, “Can you imagine living in New York? People everywhere! Models! Muggers! Homosexuals! Subways! Broadway! Deejays! Museums! Street gangs!”

  Adry got that expression in her face that she got when the music was bubbling up in her—that super-focused look, like here comes the music, get the fuck out of my fucking way! She started playing the piano, and I just watched her and listened. The first time she stopped for a second, I hit the record button on the recorder. I got my face in front of her and looked her straight in the eye and started mouthing words to her, without actually saying anything out loud: Models! Muggers! Homosexuals! I kept going with everything I could think of when I thought about New York: Skyscrapers! Pickpockets! Fancy clothes! Beggars! Jazz! And Adry kept playing—kind of following the words I was giving her, kind of in her own world. The music was incredible—abso-fucking-lutely incredible. That’s the only way to describe it. You know what I mean when I say “incredible”? Okay. Then, take that, and multiply it abso-fucking-lutely times.

  Adry sent in the cassette with everything we recorded, including the last thing. She got called in to do an audition in person at the school, and I went with her and drove. We borrowed my aunt Connie’s Datsun. Aunt Connie was pretty much out of it and didn’t even ask where we were going. Adry’s mother made a big show of offering to drive Adry in herself—this was her daughter going to interview for college—but it was pretty obvious to me that she was relieved not to have to make that long drive and find her way around New York City. She did pack us bag lunches, that she did, and she gave Adry the hugest hug I ever saw her give her, when we were leaving. Ooooooh—so sweet! She held onto Adry for so long it was like she would never see her again. She was only about ten years off.

  I packed a pair of earplugs for Adry to use if she found herself around other students playing instruments—we figured there might just be a little bit of music at a music school. And in case the earplugs didn’t quite do the job, I brought along my cassette recorder and the headphones I used for listening to records on my stereo. The cassette recorder had a shoulder strap, so you could carry it like a handbag. I told Adry, “Just put on the headphones and plug them into the recorder. I have a blank tape in there. Press play, and you won’t hear a thing but maybe a humming sound. Just pretend you’re listening to music.” I knew nobody would actually listen to a cassette with headphones and walk around that way, but it was the only scheme I could come up with without stealing a drawerful of my mother’s scarves.

  We got to Juilliard, eventually. I found a parking garage like fifty fucking miles from the school, and we got to the audition just in time. They wouldn’t let me be there for the actual audition and interview she had to do, so I went outside and walked around the area. I suppose since you’re such an expert on cultural history, you’ve been to Lincoln Center. You know—just across the street from Juilliard there’s this grand fountain, like a postcard from Rome. There’s the opera and the ballet. There’s the philharmonic orchestra. I could feel it in the air that I was in the heart of high art in New York City. I didn’t give half a shit about any of that, and my time was limited, so I went across the street and had a quick beer in a tavern there. The drinking age in New York was only 18 in 1977. So I was just a couple of months from being legal.

  I get back to Juilliard, and Adry is out of her audition and sitting in the waiting area, pretending like she’s listening to music with my headphones and cassette recorder. I ask her how it went, and she says, “I think okay. They just told me to wait out here.” We sit there together for what feels like twenty fucking years. There’s lots of other students and parents sitting around us, staring at each other. Adry gets a little antsy and starts pacing around the room, still with my headphones on and recorder hanging from her shoulder. One of the fathers, an Oriental guy—there were a bunch of families from Japan and China and Korea and the rest—he comes over to me, and he says, “Excuse me—I’m sorry, but I’m curious about your friend. Can you tell me, what is she doing with that electronic equipment?”

  I say, “She’s just listening to music.”

  He says, “Music—on a cassette? Listening with headphones? While she’s walking?”

  I say, “Yep. You have a problem with that?”

  He says, “No, no—thank you. I never saw that before.” He hands me his business card and walks away.

  I’m reading the card and trying to guess what “Sony” is, when a lady with a clipboard comes out and calls Adry’s name. Adry pulls off the headphones and walks up to her. I go over to them and stand behind the lady while they talk. The lady says, “You’ve qualified for a second audition. You can play one more piece for us, and it can be any composition of your choosing.”

  Adry stands there thinking. Looking over the lady’s shoulder, I lock eyes with Adry and start mouthing words to her.

  The lady starts writing on her clipboard. She says, “And what is the title of the piece you’ll be playing?”

  Adry says, “Models and Muggers.”

  Alton A. Herschon (Juilliard piano faculty, retired):

  I served dutifully, if not pleasurably, on the faculty committee that considered Adrianne Geffel for admission to Juilliard. If she entered the school in the fall term of 1977, as you say, her audition would have taken place in the month of March that year. I believe my vote was determinative in this instance. To be candid, I was not persuaded of Miss Geffel’s ability in the first of her auditions. If I’m not mistaken, she played Chopin’s Étude, Op. 25, No. 3, in F major—an interesting selection, don’t you think? As you know, Chopin dedicated the piece to Marie Catherine Sophie, Comtesse d’Agoult, who was Franz Liszt’s mistress. Miss Geffel’s performance had a certain polish but lacked nuanced sensitivity to the adulterous subtext of this étude. I gave her a passing score, but not a high score, for the first round.

  In her second audition, I found Ms. Geffel’s playing to be more emotively expressive. Needless to say, I loathed the piece she chose to play. It was discordant and maladroitly constructed. That Ms. Geffel selected such a work, with centuries of superior music at her disposal, was a bafflement to me. Nevertheless, her performance of the piece, in the fullness of its loathfulness, was exemplary. She played with such precision that she made the utter irrationality of the music ringingly clear. Her touch at the keyboard was meticulously controlled, from the gratuitous passages of pianissimo to the arbitrary fortissimo. Most impressively, she played with a depth of feeling that a lesser pianist would be unable to bring to music so resolutely inexplicable.

  At the conclusion of the audition, the members of the committee voted on Ms. Geffel’s candidacy, one after another. I was the first to vote, as always, being the person seated furthest to left, nearest the exit door. I voted “yea” to admit. By the
rules of admission in place at the time, a majority vote was required for acceptance. Accordingly, Ms. Geffel would still have been accepted for admission if I had voted “nay,” but the vote would not have been unanimous. Hence, without my vote in her favor, her acceptance would not have been unanimous. I made certain to let her know this several years later, when she achieved acclaim as a musician.

  Barbara Lucher:

  We left there and had no fucking clue if she was accepted or not. The letter from the school came in the mail later. We went for a walk to shake out the Juilliard dust and see the sights of New York. I don’t know which way we went, honestly, but we crossed one street, and we were in a pretty sketchy part of town. It was like The Wizard of Oz in reverse—we walked out of the color world and into the black and white. There was a bar with an Irish name, front painted all green about a hundred years ago, and now it was just shit-brown-former-green. We thought we should celebrate—or drown our tears, one or the other, we didn’t care. So we went in and had a couple of drinks. Whiskey sours, don’t ask me why—the words just sounded so New Yorky. After a while, we looked outside, and it was dark. Adry said, “Oh, God—what are we going to do now?” All of it sudden, it dawned on us that we still had a seven-hour drive home, and I was a little woozy.

  There was a pay phone in the corner. I broke a couple of bills and got change from the bartender and called my house. My mom answered, as always. My loser-ass father didn’t know where the telephone was. I said, “Big news! Adry’s audition went great! She’s talking to the people right now, and she told me to call you so you can call her mother so she doesn’t worry. They’re going to give her a tour of the school in the morning—isn’t that stupendous? They have free rooms at the school for us to stay overnight, so we’ll see you all tomorrow. Bye!” And I hung up. Adry just shook her head at me and smiled that crinkly smile of hers and ordered another round of whiskey sours.